Question

I write an php script that help with limit speed and connections in download files. I used fopen() and fseek() something like this:

$f = fopen($file, 'rb');
if($f){
    fseek($f,$start);//$start extracted from $_SERVER['HTTP_RANGE']
    while(!feof($f)){
        echo fread($f,$speed);//$speed is bytes per second
        flush();
        ob_flush();
        sleep(1);
    }
    fclose($f);
}

download process may take several hours to complete, is whole file be in memory until end of download? and how I can optimize this?

Answer 1

No, fread uses an internal buffer to stream the data (8KB by default), so only a very small part of the file actually resides in memory.